The heavy rain forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday could speed up firefighting efforts in and around Table Rock State Park, but it won’t come close to ending the drought that has parched the Upstate since last spring.

The rain was forecast to begin late Monday, with the Upstate getting up to a half an inch overnight in the first of two rounds of wet weather. Totals could reach 2 to 3 inches in Greenville, Anderson and parts of Pickens County by late Wednesday.

The men and women battling the fires between Table Rock and the North Carolina state line have their fingers crossed, according to one spokesman. Parts of the mountains and northern Pickens County, where wildfires have been burning for the past couple of weeks, could see as much as 3 inches of rain from these systems. That kind of soaking would speed up efforts to put the fire out.

“That is definitely the hope, but until the rain falls it’s hard to predict the effect,” said Steve Combs of the Anderson County Emergency Management Office, who was drafted to help out at the Table Rock Wesleyan Camp command center. “We will have crews come down off the hand lines (in the event of heavy rain), but we’ll still have people out monitoring for hotspots.”

The National Weather Service has sent a forecaster to the fire scene, and three remote monitoring stations are feeding data on humidity and other local conditions to better inform where and how firefighters are deployed.

Relief crews arrived late Sunday from Oregon and California to spell the local and state volunteers who have been fighting the mountain fire for the last two weeks. A new burnout was underway Monday in the Slickum Falls area, and a second burnout north of Table Rock reservoir was intended to check the eastern progress of the fire.

Even with such heavy rain, drought conditions will persist in the mountains and the rest of the Upstate. Lake Hartwell is down 10 feet from full pool — 660 feet above sea level — and a few inches of rain won’t make much difference, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We haven’t had substantial rainfall in about three months and inflows have dropped off to essentially nothing,” Corps Savannah District spokeswoman Chelsea Smith. “If we receive 3 to 4 inches of rainfall, it would likely have very little impact on the pools. This is because the soil is extremely dry and will absorb a lot of the rainfall, leaving little for runoff. We need sustained, normal rainfall over the next several months before we see the pools recover.”

The Greenville Water System doesn’t expect the fire, which has burned into the utility’s watershed, to foul its customers’ water.

“The fire has not affected water quality,” said Greenville Water System spokeswoman Olivia Vassey. “We haven't taken water from the Table Rock Reservoir since the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

“When our employees are able to get back in our watershed without impeding the Forestry Commission's operations, we plan to put up some silt fencing in the affected areas to prevent soot from potentially running into the reservoir,” Vassey continued. “We have been monitoring water quality and will continue to do so, but we don't really anticipate any issues.”